User blog:BeastMan14/Historical Review: "Reservoir Dogs" Holds Up in Spectacular Fashion
A classic saying came to me while I was rewatching Reservoir Dogs, the 1993 directorial debut of Quentin Tarantino. That saying is, “Gotta start somewhere.” and it means that no matter how hard-working or ambitious or brilliant you may be, you always have to start at the bottom. (Unless you’re wealthy, at which point you can pretty much start wherever you damn well please, but that’s beyond the point.) Even Tarantino, a beloved director, had to work with a small budget of $1.5 million, a couple of his buddies, and an abandoned mortuary designed to look like a warehouse when it came to his first feature. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, Reservoir Dogs shines as a subversive, clever, truly original little film unlike any that came before and matched in it’s intensity by very few that came after. Upon a first watch a few years back, I deemed it superior to Pulp Fiction, a controversial opinion akin to treason in some film circles, but a rewatch confirms that viewpoint for me. Come at me with pitchforks and torches all you want, I still stand by it. If you’ve never seen Reservoir Dogs, a couple things. 1) Why are you reading a retrospective of a Tarantino movie? 2) Please leave because I’m going to delve into spoilers a bit here and I’d rather you experience the film first rather than have me ruin it for you. 3) Go watch it and come back. Make sure to close this page and reopen it because I need the clicks. For those of you that have already seen Reservoir Dogs, congrats, you’re the cool ones. The first thing that really stands out about Reservoir Dogs is the sheer confidence of Tarantino as a filmmaker, and the trust he already has in the audience from the get-go. An aspect of directorial debuts is that there’s usually a enthusiasm to the proceedings, a feeling like a kid in a toy store excitedly grabbing you by the hand and showing all the cool things they like, and if done poorly, it can feel overwhelming or indecisive. All the cool tricks you want to show don’t mean much if you’ve done that poorly, and that’s why the opening of Reservoir Dogs is so surprising: for all the talk of how it’s a crime thriller, it opens with a bunch of guys sitting around a table, having a largely unimportant conversation about Madonna’s “Like A Virgin” and the importance of tipping waitresses that still manages to give us a feel for everyone’s personalities. Mr. Pink is something of a weasel, Mr. Blonde is calm and collected, Mr. White is somewhat compassionate, and you get the sense that these are a group of criminals with some form of ethics to them. In a lesser heist film, the opening would be dedicated more to getting the team together, and we’d get a peek at their personalities that way, but Tarantino’s decision to open the movie with the team already together makes it more intriguing to watch. And then, after the slow-motion shot of the crew walking together as the opening credits start, we smash-cut to the aftermath of the clearly disastrous heist, as a bleeding, crying Mr. Orange lays in the backseat of Mr. White’s car. That’s right, the heist movie never even shows us the heist itself, because Tarantino understands that the audience’s mental image of it is superior to anything he can actually show us, especially on a shoestring budget. Instead, he gives us just enough details to fill in the blanks ourselves. The “tell, don’t show” tactic is a favorite of the film’s, as for all the talk of how violent it is (which is well-deserved), much of the film’s more gruesome sequences are never shown. The iconic scene where Mr. Blonde tortures pans away before we can see anything truly horrific and the heist, an apparent bloodbath that left two members of the crew dead alongside numerous cops and civilians, is never seen, with the only details we learn being that the police arrived before someone tripped an alarm, causing Blonde to kill the hostages and the crew to split up and suspect that there’s a “snitch” in the group, an account which even the characters contradict themselves on. Instead of a gangster movie, you’re basically given a one-location play that relies on the strengths of the characters and dialogue to keep you engaged. And that wouldn’t work if it wasn’t for the cast, who are all very good. The standout is likely Steve Buscemi, who serves as the closest thing the film has as comic relief, or Michael Madsen, whose Mr. Blonde has a deeply unsettling charisma to him. You get nervous just looking at him, and you can almost trace a line between Mr. Blonde and the likes of Heath Ledger’s Joker or Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh, killers who are ghoulish but intensely fascinating to watch. As what are basically the film’s leads, Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth are charming, and they have an easy chemistry that goes from friendly to at times borderline homoerotic, from the way Keitel’s Mr. White cradles, protects, and almost nurtures Roth’s Orange. Little details like this go a long way towards establishing the film’s characters and tone as something that for all it’s macho posing, it has something of a heart to it. This heart plays into the film’s subversiveness, as it makes us realize these criminals aren’t really badass gangsters, they’re people. The characters of Reservoir Dogs are cowardly, short-tempered, impulsive, witty, and ignorant and it catches the audience off-guard in an era where we’re so used to cool, collected bad guys. Look at how Mr. Orange reacts to being shot, for instance. He screams, writhes in pain, and spends most of the film laying in a puddle of his own blood, making the mid-act reveal where he was the “snitch” all the more surprising, as this seemingly wimpy character couldn’t possibly be brave enough to go undercover, let alone kill Mr. Blonde, established as the most vicious and brutal member of the crew. In a more traditional film, the reveal that Orange is the cop would come near the end, a last-minute shock that would catch you off-guard, but probably fall apart in hindsight, so by moving the twist to the middle of the film and dedicating a brilliantly edited flash-back to the how and why Orange ended up in the crew, the film gives you a chance to soak it in, making the twist more effective. Much of the film’s storytelling is stronger due to Tarantino’s patented non-linear structure, so we get to see scenes that establish the behavior of the characters without ever over-relying on exposition. In flashback, we get to see details like how the experienced White befriended Orange and Blonde’s surprising loyalty to the Cabot crime family, details that could’ve felt clunky or unearned if they had just been said to us. The use of flashbacks and non-linear storytelling was nothing new, but Tarantino was the first to utilize in a (relatively) mainstream American film. When the film first screened at Sundance Film Festival, it was unlike anything film critics at the time had ever seen. Jami Bernard of the New York Daily News compared it to L'Arrivée d'un Train en Gare de la Ciotat, the famous film of a train arriving at the station that had filmgoers diving out of the way of the screen, with the violence outright shocking several viewers into outright leaving. Notably, Wes Craven, legendary horror director, walked out during the torture scene, surprising Tarantino, who mused in an interview with Entertainment Weekly years later, “The f—ing guy who did Last House on the Left walked out? The guy who did Last House on the Left, my movie’s too tough for him.” Upon it’s release, the film was an instant cult classic, critically acclaimed, and a relative hit in the indie circuit, even if it was banned for it’s violence from an initial video release. It would be the start of Tarantino’s collaboration with Miramax as his distributor. Reservoir Dogs, for anyone that hasn’t quite gotten it from the context of the review, absolutely holds up, both as a film and a summary of Tarantino’s style as a filmmaker. It’s got all the classics: violence, usage of classic music, non-linear storytelling, and it’s a better debut film than some filmmakers make in their entire careers. *Score: 100% *Hypothetical Ballot Spots: **Best Picture **Best Director: Quentin Tarantino **Best Original Screenplay **Best Supporting Actor: Micheal Madsen **Best Supporting Actor: Steve Buscemi **Best Film Editing Category:Blog posts Category:Reviews Category:Historical Reviews